


Impostors

by tangentti



Category: Firefall Series - Peter Watts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28053657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangentti/pseuds/tangentti
Summary: The second visit to Rorschach is a learning experience for both sides.  Where does that fifth suit come from, and who is inside?
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Impostors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NeverwinterThistle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/gifts).



_Every time the tale is told Siri repeats it differently, hoping the intellects of Earth will mine details from the spaces between words, the new descriptions, if they are even listening to words anymore. The topologies of memory twist, are flattened, new embeddings in low dimensional spaces are constructed. Literal truth does not convey meaning efficiently, does not evoke the correct impulse in the receiver._

The second time we probed Rorschach, there was a rebellion against the Captain. Against Sarasti, in any case. “We learned nothing, except that we fry as easily as the drones, and break in new and exciting ways. Amanda thought she was dead: surely you won’t send us until that thought is real.”  
Sarasti had done us the favor of being visible. He clicked his tongue, eerily, once, twice. “You, Siri, do not understand. Rorschach is patterned. You, Siri, tell me why you go to Rorschach. Tell me why I send you.” In a brief motion, the vampire stood close to Siri. “Tell me the uses of meat.”  
“Rorschach,” Siri began, and Sarasti hissed, and he rewound, “Firefall, attracted attention, sent us haring after Burns-Caulfield. But we came here, and Rorschach, “ another hiss, “and the scoops came into view. The Rorschach object cloaked from our sight, until indirect evidence got a probe to an angle for viewing.” He licked his lips, nervously, “Then it talked,” a click from Sarasti, “Then it deflected us into a maze of transmissions appearing as speech, and you ordered us into close proximity. Once the drones failed to return useful data, you sent us in.”  
“Prey,” Sarasti said, and mockingly crossed index fingers in front of Siri’s eyes. Anti-Euclideans in full effect. “You waste time. I am a vampire, I hunt your tribe, eat your children. You do not see me.”  
Simplified, “It deflects, cloaks, hides, because,” sharply Sarasti slapped Siri, rewound, “For reasons not simply reduced.” A deep breath, “Meat is complex instrumentation, we learn how we are deflected, how it cloaks from us, to get to the next level.”  
“Instrumentation. Go and instrument.” Rebellion was over.

_The vampire had already become dangerous, uninhibited. Visible to prey. Engaging in physical violence, even in the smallest measure. The warnings were there already, that Siri was going to be required to witness, to act for the vampire in ways he could not. To represent Humans._

The second time was tense, because we knew what to expect. The armor had been reshaped, printed out again from the fabricators, ridges, patterns to interact, to disrupt our outlines against the material within Rorschach. We all looked identical, a herd of humans to confuse predators lurking in the alien vessel. Four of us, as we slid through the airlock into the hot zone one by one. Bounding overwatch, Bates called it, had us move by pairs, by ones.   
If we moved in pairs, who was the one? “Sarasti?” The angles were confusing, and Siri couldn’t resolve the identity.  
“Siri, what are you talking about?” It was Sarasti’s voice, mimicking Bates. I looked, and what had been Amanda’s suit clearly resolved as holding Sarasti, acting as Bates would have. But he was slightly too long, too vampiric to pass.  
“All suits close on my position.”  
“Belay that,” Bates, the real Bates, said. “That’s not Siri.”  
“Sarasti is here, there are five suits of armor, and we need to close up.”  
“I have eyes on the suit claiming to hold Siri, and it’s definitely not him.” That was the real Bates, again, Sarasti having sleight-of-handed himself and the fraudulent armor away. Siri could see her.   
“Can you see Sarasti, Amanda?” James and Szpindel’s armor came into view. But it wasn’t James inside, none of the cores, and the voice was Sarasti mimicking Susan.  
“No, I can’t see Sarasti, the vampire is back on the ship, but I have weapons on an entitiy pretending to be Siri. Stay out of firing lines.”  
Szpindel, over a text message, “Time to fall back to the tent, everyone. We can sort out the impostor then.” Eerily, Sarasti’s voice echoed the words as Siri read them.  
“There are only four of us in view, what happened to James?” Siri spoke, and regretted it.  
“Retasking drone. Whoever is riding Susan’s armor, don’t move. Szpindel, with me. I have no contacts for the real Siri and James.”  
“It’s me, Susan, leading the Gang. Amanda, you know me.”  
“I know Susan, and you are not her, whatever Chinese Room you have imitating her.”  
Sarasti as Szpindel, texting a message, despite the armor being in view. “Check your drone transponders, Bates, they know who they are targeting.”  
“They’re forging IFF.”  
“Yes, and so it’s time to fall back to the tent,” Szpindel sent a text message, scrolling across view. “Voice and vision is corrupted,” the text continued, “Read and come to the tent. Ignore distractions, stand down drones. Use map overlay only, don’t look or listen.”  
It made no sense, but Siri shuttered the visor and turned off the audio. Rorschach’s interior took on the low-resolution edge-enhanced look of a primitive video.  
The text message continued, “Safe to read texts, safe to use location services. Not safe to look or hear voices.”

One, two, three, and Siri made four. “Where’s the fifth suit, where is Sarasti?”  
“On the ship,” Bates said, “where are the two impostors?”  
“Calmly,” Szipindel said, “reduplication syndromes. There are only the four of us, and there have only been the four of us. Talk it through: Siri start.”  
“Sarasti was in a suit, out there, and mimicking Amanda first, then Susan, then you.”  
“Does that seem reasonable to you?”  
“No, but it’s what happened.”  
“Zero points. It’s what your brain assumed was true when it couldn’t link the person you saw to the identity they had in your head. Interesting that you assumed they were Sarasti, usually Fregoli syndrome is someone they have strong feelings about.”  
“Okay, are you going to argue that the two impostors are also my brain? The drones saw them as well.”  
“How many suits did the drones see in total?”’  
“Four”.  
“You saw Siri and Susan, and couldn’t link identity either. Capgras syndrome, you saw them as strangers replacing individuals. Brain’s not a truth engine, but tries to make any seemingly veridical theory that will resolve contradictions. Eyes and ears are trusted sources, so when you see someone you know, your brain doesn’t theorize about who they are, it just supplies an answer. If I spoke to you, or called attention to me, you’d stop believing I was who I was. Reading is new, evolutionarily, not trusted, so you have to reason about the text, and your intellect understands perfectly well that your companions haven’t been replaced by duplicates.”

_Siri falls towards the inner system. The listeners have to conjecture his identity, when he simply knows who he is. Rorschach, or what lies beyond it, deflects, cloaks, hides. It will try to make them believe that he is not who he says he is, that his words are an attack, a deception to make them look aside from the truth._

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, a bit of neuroscience that can be googled.


End file.
